Tea From An Empty Cup Examines Problematic Aspects Of First Wave Cyberpunk

“You people, you lost your souls a long time ago, you sold them for a good parking space.”

Published in 1998, Tea from an Empty Cup is one of the later cyberpunk books from Pat Cadigan. Revolving around a mystery in which a person is killed, perhaps murdered, while in a virtual reality rig that just so happens to be located in a locked room, the book appears more straight forward than it actually is. This death is a catalyst for two people to enter the same program in cyberspace that eventually intersect. One is a detective attempting to solve the mysterious death, the other set to find a someone who’s suddenly gone missing.

Embodiment is put into focus and takes on a different shape, so to speak, than previous Pat Cadigan books. People put on a suit of varying quality derived by the number of contact points on the body in the suit, which allows for a more “real” experience. Previous books generally explore memories and mind-to-mind technologies, so this is quite different than other books. An entirely different focus.

“Doesn’t mean Japan is dead. It just means everyone’s left the geographical coordinates that once marked the location of the country that was called Japan. It doesn’t mean there isn’t a Japan. Somewhere”

 In this world, earthquakes destroyed Japan and one of the most trafficked simulated environments, and where the majority of the story takes place, is New Yawk Sitty. The novel weaves in a theme of fetishization of Japanese people; a problem that first wave cyberpunk novels were academically criticized for. Whereas most of first wave novels were xenophobic and technophobic due to the anxiety surrounding Japan possibly becoming a technological superpower that would consume the west, this novel flips that notion on its head, showing that the culture that ended up being consumed was Japan by the west.

In this future, there remaining Japanese people are seemingly struggling to hold onto their identity and given a certain amount of social credit if they are “full Japanese.” I’ll note here that whether or not the handling of the cultural aspects of the plot and setting are handled well, I really couldn’t say, as I’m not educated in it enough to talk intelligently about it. But it did feel like a prevalent theme given proper weight.

The grit present in cyberpunk is certainly present online, but some of the navigation of cyberspace is a bit dated reading it today. Avatars and cultural touchstones have shifted nowadays, but where it shines is in displaying how people behave when afforded anonymity. It is prescient. This ability for people to customize their presentation and construct an alternate world, as well as what that would reflects in the real world proper, are all compelling and seem more progressive than previous novels by the author. Or perhaps are just more overtly so? Though, some of the original power of the text is most likely diminished because much of the technical aspects have already played out, whereas here it is supposition and exploration.

“No age given; under sex it said, Any; all; why do you care?”

As it is now, the mystery itself is interesting and drives the story reasonably well, and the commentary and exploration on the fetishization of marginalized groups and the seemingly inevitable recreation of violent colonialism playing out in the new digital frontier are the most compelling aspects in this relatively short and fast-paced story.

“A.R is humanity’s true destiny. In A.R, everyone is immortal.

If you don’t mind existing solely in reruns.”

Pat Cadigan's Fools Asks If You're As Paranoid As You Need To Be

“In all the complexity born of sheer duration…that’s what ultimately belongs to me, to anyone: beauty, and loss.”

Coming off some earlier cyberpunk works such as Mindplayers and Synners, Pat Cadigan’s Fools, while not placed in the Mindplayers series of books (labeled Deadpan Allie), feels like it takes place within the same world. The most exciting elements of Mindplayers can be found in it. Most predominate are memories as a commodity, the consumption of which comes with a high akin to drugs, so long as the memory is relatively new to the mind. Cadigan extrapolates societal paranoia and deliberately conflates it with individual, subjective memory. Years later Strange Days poses the same question: are you paranoid enough? Only in Fools, when you can buy memories along with the pop culture you’re consuming, it’s perhaps an even more terrifying thing to consider.

“How about you, madam? You may think you’re paranoid. But are you paranoid enough?”

The main character is at the crux of an intriguing exploration regarding a personal identity and how much of it is entangled in their memories. Especially if those memories do not belong to that person. Fools keeps the reader guessing. You’ll never be 100% sure who the main character actually is.

She may be an actress who downloads characters, embodying them for a time and then expels them from her mind. She could also be a memory junkie, addicted to the high. And, possibly, the actress is just one such collection of memories, a persona. While the junkie is the “real” person.

“What’s that old saying? Art is long. But life is short. And memory is my past that changed.”

Just when you think you’ve got a hold on what is going on the rug is pulled out from your feet. Again and again, with each part of the story as it unfolds, a new twist is introduced that brings into question what you thought you knew.

As the main character, as I’ll refer to her as, since who knows her real name or persona at any given time, is coming to grips with what may be happening within her own mind, she is also being pursued by people who have their own relationships to the people occupying her mind. It’s a very satisfying, twisting story that reveals more of what happened gradually. Introducing more complexity to the story at just the right times, so it is never overwhelming when it easily could be.

Fools navigates different areas of the city in riveting fashion. Surfacing each persona in the main character in a fish-out-of-water type situation that the reader can easily identify with. As she flounders, so do you. Personhood and embodiment are explored at a different angle than previous works. The reader taken along for the ride.

“You looking for truth?…Or just keeping a secret?”

Cadigan also continues to show distinction from other authors at the time by not putting poverty and marginalization tourism, as well as hyper-sexualization—things typically associated with cyberpunk during this time—at the forefront of her work. There is also no love interest central to the character. There is no giant megacorp with the boot of the neck of the impoverished for shock, either.

“People who mouthkiss are capable of anything.”

Instead, low life aspects feel more authentic and engaging. Each new notion regarding marginalization parallels a direct experience from the character. Even when one of the personas is an escort, and beauty is definitely depicted as a commodity being leveraged by those with power, it isn’t shown in a male gaze way. It’s merely a fact of life for people and something tied to the identity of the main character(s).

Cadigan occupies a beguiling, at times, intersection of cyberpunk because while she is often called “The Queen of Cyberpunk” and is sometimes in academia thumbed for not being directly feminist—she is also undoubtedly, never really invoking tropes typically associated with masculine authors in the genre. Her characters are competent. They are not defined by gender and are not sexually liberated and non-monogamous. Sex takes a back seat and never used solely to depict marginalization. The exploration of the idea is what matters principally in her cyberpunk works.

“Truth is cheap. Information costs. Can you afford information? Or only the truth”

Another device used to significant effect is the changes to how the text is presented. It is changed up to help the reader with the transitions from the different identities surfacing in the main character. Fonts change. Sometimes they are in bold; sometimes italicized. Even still, however, this is a much more complex narrative than the typical cyberpunk books. It will challenge you, as it uses these changes in the story to drive forward the plot at a much more frenetic pace. The changes also work to further ground the reader in the headspace. It’s clever and fun. The cadence of each character’s “voice” adapts to the textual switch ups, really driving home the differences in each one.

Unfortunately, some of my favorite elements of the plot need to be kept mysterious because they reveal some of the plot. Make no mistake, Fools is one of the most compelling cyberpunk novels. Even more so when you consider how unique it is for the year it was released: the same year, in fact, as the release of Snow Crash, 1992.

Ironically, Fools was another fantastic addition to a plethora of books that prove the sub-genre was just hitting its stride. Some of its very best contributions began just when the founders of the sub-genre declared the cyberpunk movement—not the sub-genre—was dead upon the release of the satirical, post-cyberpunk Snow Crash. At the time, it seemed to mark the commodification and absorption of cyberpunk into “mainstream” science fiction and pop culture. Read the two side by side, however, and you’ll find none of the elements in Snow Crash that were satirized.

In hindsight, various, typically more marginalized, authors met with limited commercial success at the time were already busy iterating on cyberpunk. Fools is illustrative of that fact, and appropriately titled.

“Funny how that works, how you can lose someone by finding her.”

In This Cyberpunk Novel, Truth Is In The Eyes Of The Mindplayer

“You’ve got to look while it’s happening…Otherwise you miss seeing it the way it should be seen.”

With first wave cyberpunk in full swing in 1987, Pat Cadigan's Mindplayers represents somewhat of an anomaly. While cyberspace was the predominate playground for most cyberpunk at that time, there are no runners traversing digital lines into some corporations' information vaults lined with protective ICE. Instead, a kind of cyberspace exists only to facilitate mind-to-mind contact, lucid dreaming, and mind-altering substances.

Allie is a mind criminal who uses a number of banned substances and illegal devices before she's actually busted by the mind police. When a friend named Jerry steals a mindcap and convinces her to use it, her mind is left with lasting damage. He dumps her off to get help but they both get snatched, starting their very separate journeys.

“Does all of this really mean that much to you? It’s just stuff. Jerry. It’s just expensive stuff. You’re risking your - your self for a goddamn nouveau couch?”

Turns out instead of serving time, you can become a mindplayer—encompassing several disciplines that people use to alter their state of consciousness. Roughly, these services are kind of forms of therapy, though there are also neurosis peddlers too, so who knows. Rather than go to jail, Allie decides to become a mindplayer.  After all, if you mess yourself up enough then they can just scrub your mind, at least, ostensibly you can. No big deal, right?

Mindplayers is at its absolute best when its exploring ideas around psychosis and how the people who meet and interact with one another, mold and shape each other; with or without their knowledge. This is taken to extremes when people meet mind-to-mind, navigating the contours of one another's consciousness. Opening the flood gates and exposing this contact for all sorts of allegories.

Thankfully, with subject matter like this there is no poverty tourism or fetishization, or even hyper-sexualism that is often present in this wave of cyberpunk books. Instead, the judiciary system decides Allie is a criminal and her best option as presented to her, is to assimilate into the system that labels her a threat, or else suffer extreme repercussions. While she may have been on a dangerous trajectory, as it's implied that she had been using a lot of other mind-altering illegal substances, but not mindcaps, to be in a continual altered state, it's interesting to me that in this story, the omnipresence is actually something systemic. There is no "evil" corporation. It's just the state. It analyzes her, determines she has value due to her brain chemistry, and immediately commodifies her.

“Anyone’s capable of developing delusions under the right conditions.”

The majority of the story is Allie undergoing this training and the obstacles she faces, which change her mind in unexpected ways. And the situations she's put in with her clients in order to work off this debt are inherently dangerous and each of them leaves an "after taste" on the mind. People's fetishes, violent desires, and neurosis become weaponized, physical forces in a medium like mind-to-mind contact. So in an effort to commodify her she is also dehumanized and risks losing her sense of self. With the alternative being jail. It’s a compelling and different. To connect mind-to-mind you use technology that attaches to the optic nerve (typically, though there are exceptions), which means peoples’ eyes are removed. They sometimes need to purchase new ones when the old ones wear out, and they can become status symbols when people buy cats eyes or ones associated with different gem stones. Though a bit on the nose, it leads to both of these kinds of people not being able to see things for what they truly are, whether oppressed by the system or apart of it.

The only downside to a narrative exploring this kind of subject matter is that it necessarily feels quite loose, and dreamy, which is not indicative of a genre generally known for frenetic pacing. I could see it being off putting to people reading the sub-genre frequently. While most of the subversions of masculine cyberpunk are welcome, this did make it hard to get invested in. I wanted to get to the next exploration of the waking or subconscious mind. While the story came to a satisfying conclusion, and the format for which it's presented in makes sense, the pacing was hindered by it.

“Do you know there are no longer any actors alive today who still have their own eyes?…It seems strange. Drawing on life and looking at it through artificial eyes.”

On another positive note, though, another welcome subversion indicative of Cadigan's work is how she writes her protagonists. I mentioned that there is no hyper-sexualization, but it's more so that sexuality doesn't play much of a role in the story at all. While Allie has relationships with others, the story rarely if ever focuses on the physicality of anything. It’s on point for the story being told and contributes to its uniqueness.

Additionally, masculine cyberpunk and feminine cyberpunk tend to be most different with how embodiment is handled. Masculine leans toward mind over body; feminine gives far more weight to a persons' body comprising their overall identity. Mindplayers falls somewhere in the middle. Later, in Synners, Cadigan has made up her mind about this. But here mind-to-mind contact is more of extrapolation between people's interactions in real life. In that way, embodiment matters. But it always feels like a medium, with not much weight really being attributed to it beyond that. Allie is simply not a physical person, she continually reiterates that she has always had an active mind and been in her head, rather than a busy social life. The minor details of her life, from her perspective, truly fall away in the story. For good and, sometimes, at the expense of a more thematically tight narrative. It’s compelling to see the starting of a throughline that would ultimately lead to Synners, which feels like it benefited greatly from this against the grain tale.

“Not a single thing that’s passed between us has been real and yet you’ve been hunting me like the hound of heaven.”

Cyberpunk 101 - The Truly Novel In Cyberpunk Literature

"What is new in cyberpunk is, first of all, the conspicuousness of certain motifs in the same texts, the solidarity among these motifs, the way they mutually corroborate and reinforce each other to create a motif complex which is distinctive of the cyberpunk wave of SF, even if every one of the individual items making up the complex can be traced back to earlier SF phases." – Brian McHale

A critique leveled at cyberpunk is that there is no real novelty within the sub-genre. While marketed as being new and subversive, from a literary perspective critics have traced the major tropes and devices in cyberpunk back to earlier science fiction, or else other genres entirely. Cyberpunk in some eyes is merely an arrangement of these things to be provocative and play into a self-ascribed label, to be punk and contrary within the science fiction literary genre itself at the time and nothing more.

"cyberpunk tends to "literalize" or "actualize" what in the postmodernist fiction occurs as metaphor" – Brian McHale

However, in Towards the Poetics of Cyberpunk, which I will be quoting extensively in this piece, Brian McHale argues that cyberpunk has added to science fiction and been novel in so doing.

Motifs like outer-space fiction as building-blocks, as seen on shows like Star Trek, for example, were adapted to show stratification of class. Rather than the clean, sterile environments prevalent in science fiction at the time, "cyberpunk substitutes off-world havens of privilege, orbiting penthouses to which the wealthy and powerful withdraw to escape the poverty and danger of the planet surface…". Thus the sterile, clean realms so prevalent were defined for only the upper class and few who benefited from the marginalized; incidentally leaving behind a wake of their own refuse for those same people.

Additionally, this variant to microworlds depicting class by way of attainable knowledge also did so by way of literal geography within the fiction. Protected areas in cyberpunk often gate more than the privileged individuals; literal islands within the fiction that curtail the ability of peoples to obtain something coveted and protected: data. This can be more than just geographical in normal physical space negotiated traditionally by protagonists as well, porting this motif to different realities (microworlds), and reinforcing the motif. Conversely, these same or similar islands may hold marginalized people in physical space; radical "renegades" that guard their own autonomy fiercely and resist integration into society proper. 

Digitally their ability to move up in class may be "close by" via navigating cyberspace; physically they have no means to actually go to the "fortress", so to speak. In cyberspace VIP access, private spaces for which there is some code, procedure, or structure that is an island onto itself when compared to other parts of the free-roaming space reassert the trope further. In some instances you can be so "good" in cyberspace that you can move through seemingly impenetrable places, leaving your body behind. In this way there are many islands, in every space, including cyberspace; and they are used to explore many different ideas of selfhood.

This juxtaposition can be traced back to medieval romance roots (and later, westerns), in so far as the protagonists having a journey. The Knight's Errant Itinerary navigating from microworld to microworld. Instead of venturing into a mythic microworld used as a metaphor, the protagonist is navigating microworlds that are literalized or actualized. Often this notion will have visual likeness or outright uncanny resemblence to actual mythology to make this distinction even more clear to the reader.

"While Joyce's Leopold Bloom "is" Odysseus only figuratively, in a kind of extended metaphor, Shiner's Kane really is the Hero with a Thousand Faces on a different but parallel plane of reality…The paraspace motif, including cyberspace and its functional equivalent, the myth-world…makes possible, in other words, metafictional reflection by the text on its own ontological procedures." – Brian McHale

In postmodern texts there are usually only metaphors for one of the primary ideas cyberpunk fiction wishes to explore: selfhood. Androids, Artificial Intelligence, cybernetics, autonomy, a simulacrum. These are all, again, actualized and literalized in the sub-genre.

Traditional cyberpunk made use of the traditional robot motif in order to ask the same questions about human identity but twisted it, no longer the automaton used so often. Androids invoked the uncanny in their resemblance to humanity, asking the reader ‘at what point is a machine a human?' The automata and A.I are in the exploration of selfhood but are a distinct ingrained, reoccuring motif in cyberpunk.

In biopunk, clones are grown and imprinted with someone else's identity, "pluralizing the self." The use of body horror elements and invasion of agency is invoked... but in a distinctive, cyberpunk way. The actualization of the lack of human agency is to have your mind consumed by a technological network or embedded into another body, grown under the control of someone with more power than you; ultimately using that power to manipulate you to their own ends. Designer drugs and physical chips created by an omnipresence here to curate your destiny. A new kind of Zombie.

"The theme of the centrifugal self, and the representational motifs throughout which it is manifested in cyberpunk SF are essentially incompatible with the perspectivist narrative strategies of modern fiction." – Brian McHale

Simulated spaces in cyberpunk also bring with them more information than normal. You don't merely "see" data in cyberspace, you interpret something physical in a digital space that informs you what it is when you're "jacked" into the virtually constructed space. Beyond this, cyberpunk fiction lets the user customize their identity when hooked up as well. This itself sometimes allows for subversion while also solving a literary problem, in which the fiction is centralized to a specific perspective.

 "implicitly undermining the model of the centered, centripetal self upon which modernist perspectivism rests. For with the flip of a switch, Case is able to experience another's body…another's physical pain". – Brian McHale

When Case does this in Neuromancer, it also allows for the radical ability to embody a different gender identity than his own. "the characteristic cyberpunk motif of simstim (simulated stimulation) gives fresh, concrete, and radical meaning to Dick Higgins's question, "Which of my selves is to do it?"

Another motif changed by cyberpunk is the one of nuclear war. By creating microworlds anew, cyberpunk fiction shifts the idea of a collective disaster to personal extinction. Death is everywhere, including cyberspace. This extinction extends to the notion of selfhood, in which the self-extinction would eradicate our mind and sense of being. Perhaps not even realizing it either, occupying a different microworld when this devastation comes.

The sub-genre also features liminal stages of death. In some fiction, like Pat Cadigan's Synners, Visual Mark can view his meat body even as it's dead and dying, thinking faster than the death that is coming for him. A microworld, an island, working to transfer consciousness and interrogate the state of being between life and death. Sometimes being able to be revived, other times used as a device to make a statement about embodiment.

Ghosts in the machines, ghosts from the machine in the case of Gibson's Ghosts in Mona Lisa Overdrive. Either way, our spiritual selves and the exploration of death is pervasive in cyberpunk—and it took a new form from the old in doing so. 

These motifs are invariably found in most all cyberpunk fiction, certainly all first wave. Because they structurally support the same fundamental concepts, overlapping and reinforcing, and do so in a novel way at the onset of cyberpunk fiction, the sub-genre has invariably contributed to science fiction. 

This is part of a series of blog posts called cyberpunk 101, starting with my first piece Defining Cyberpunk, in which I attempt to communicate an internalize my thoughts on cyberpunk with the help of academic literature on the subject I'm consuming.

You can find the original piece that goes into more detail than this one contained in Beyond Cyberpunk: New Critical Perspectives. 

Synners: Leaving A Visual Mark

"Who do you love?"

Although published in 1991 the world of Synners and L.A in the late 80's still feels relevant. More relevant than a lot of cyberpunk, even late first wave ones such as this. Pat Cadigan missed the normal technological advancements the genre is known for such as: cell phones. But reading it doesn't feel archaic though, maybe because it's a hard, purposeful look at nostalgia itself. 

"The way we all kept adding to the nets did exactly that, passed a threshold. It got to the point where the net should have collapsed in chaos, but it didn't. Or rather it did, but the collapse was not a collapse in the conventional sense."

GridLid automates your car completely even handles all the traffic jams, resulting in people being fearful of non-automated systems, never having driven "manually" before. Entertainment is imbibed while the bumper-to-bumper traffic takes you hours to get to work. There is porn for everything. Traffic porn, med porn, war porn, food porn. People get off on most anything that's packaged as entertainment. And the stuff that isn't trending now, is gone. Viruses are prevalent and are just a hazard of the world;  most people don't know how to get rid of them. Discarding technical know-how for the ease of products automating their lives. 

That's where the punks come in, the hackers.  

"If you can't fuck it and it doesn't dance. Eat it or throw it away."

A slow build up hampers the book at first. Most of the pages are reserved for introductions to each. Though effective in the long term, it does take a while to get into it. But once it's done showing you the characters and by proxy, the world—the book is undeniably richer for it. 

Where Synners is so interesting compared to some other first wave novels (beyond the world building aspects) is that there is kind of a post-cyberpunk vibe happening throughout, intentional or otherwise.

"We don't grieve for what might have been in rock'n'roll. We just keep rockin' on."

Gina is old enough to remember and venerate "properly," rock'n'roll music. This lauding of a wave that died out, along with the notion that "punk" is also dead is a consistent through line, reinforced with vivid imagery of music videos and lyrics from songs that just won't leave her alone. She is stuck in a self destructive loop that is explained by the impulses of the human body, rooting her problems in her humanity. Her pain seems to stem from her embodiment, yet she still wouldn't change a thing. Hard life, hard love, hard everything.  

"Back in Mexico, when he first put the wires in when you were there. If you'd leaned down then, put your mouth on his, he might have stayed. Because after that nothing could pull him back, not love, not sex, not you. Not nothing, not no-how."

Visual Mark on the other hand chooses the "datalines" (the Internet) instead. Once a close couple, madly in love, eating each other up—now mature and unable to carry on with their relationship; effectively due to the past. Their mistakes, their nostalgia for them, and the various forms of coping so they don't ever have to deal with it, all damning of the societal structures in place. Mark unwilling to take true responsibility for them, instead shrugging them off to the system. 

"He was still wondering what would become of him when he felt the first shock wave, followed by the last message he would ever receive from the meat."

The main thrust of the book is that "sockets" are invented, which would also be antiquated tech in most cyberpunk novels, and the world dives right in because capitalism. Diversifications, a megacorporation disseminates this new and unsafe tech to the masses.  And while Gina hungers for the same power to make music videos "alive" again through the use of this technology, possibly rekindling everyone's love for rock'n'roll again, as well as Mark's own love for her. Mark allows it to consume him whole. 

Through the eyes of many of the characters we see what capitalism has wrought. Only this time it's through this more interesting lens rooted in music; quizzically, not punk. The idea that the first wave was almost gone and along with it, cyberpunk as a subgenre, parallels Gina and Mark's struggle with their past and glory days. How enticing our memories make events that were actually horrible; allowing us to view the wreckage of our lives with rose-coloured glasses. Post-cyberpunk in that it seems to critically evaluate the genre, subverting it in a few places.

"This ain't rock'n'roll. It ain't been rock'n'roll for a long fucking time. This is business, and money, and change for the machines, but it ain't rock'n'roll.

Mark himself could represent the genre as it existed in first wave. He is an anti-hero, unlikeable but attractive in non-conformative ways. His past has destroyed parts of him, including some brain damage that makes him even better at using tech to become more than he is now, transcending himself. Leaving "the meat," as he so often refers to it, behind. He has a particular affinity and knack for something because society has fucked him up; the "system" has damaged him. The typical protagonist for early cyberpunk.

"I'm not really in there, now. I'm maintaining it, but there's nobody home. I know it doesn't happen that way for you, but that's how it is for me. "

Gina can interact with people just fine, though. She is more-or-less "well adjusted" and chooses to be a voice of dissent. Picking physical conflicts and verbal ones, choosing embodiment every step of the way. How she interacts with people, especially if they are seen by her as being a part of the system that has essentially destroyed the love of her life, Visual Mark, is by being angry. Being a punk. She is a part of an older generation,  now been left behind. She's angry, and tired, and does exactly what she wants when she wants to. The only weakness she has is Mark, the personification of this old way of life that she cannot let go. The wound in her mouth that would heal; if she'd only stop tonguing it. 

The book is primarily (as I see it) about examining embodiment; the products of our society and commodification of anything of value. Who power structures benefit and what those wounds might look like in a cyberpunk future becoming an allegory for the targeting of the unlucky few, who grow to be far too many. How powerful nostalgia is, a resurgence of it being inevitable, often; usually by means of any advancement in technologies. It's smart, funny, at times; easy to empathize with, and features good prose mixed with a cyberpunk aesthetic that feels like a prequel while being critical of the genre as it was about to "die."

It's worth reading.

"But it's different when you think you have no choice, and then suddenly you do after all."